At this point in time, one may legitimately ask just how sharp the dividing line remains between “Side A” and “Side B,” when it seems almost no expression of gay identity is out of bounds for Side B Christians. This question was openly raised in a Religion News report last year, in which Collins suggested some in the Side B camp might feel they have more “shared ground” with “Side A people who are Christians” than with more conservative same-sex attracted Christians, some of whom might have roots in the old “ex-gay” movement. Collins is not alone in comfortably referring to people on Side A as “Christians.” Wesley Hill has a similar stance toward affirming fellow Episcopal priests, even saying he “could be wrong” in his own commitment to the traditional sexual ethic.

In 2018, Wesley Hill published a report in First Things on a movement that claimed to be breaking new ground in the Christian discourse around faith and sexuality. It was the inaugural year of the Revoice conference, which billed itself as an ecumenical orthodox space for same-sex attracted Christians who wanted to honor a traditional sexual ethic, yet believed the Church’s approach to the issue needed to be rethought—“revoiced.” Such Christians needed more than a “vocation of no,” Hill argued. They needed a way to integrate their sexuality into their Christianity. They needed a “vocation of yes.”
Carl R. Trueman was an early critic of the Revoice project, although he was sympathetic in theory. Despite some concerns, he hoped the movement would self-correct and mature in response to good-faith criticism. But following a World magazine report on the conference’s 2022 convention, Trueman offered a less than favorable updated assessment: So far from self-correcting, the movement had ignored its critics and taken on board all the trappings of sexual identitarianism, from “preferred pronouns” to queer theory to the splintering of attendees into “affinity groups” based on their particular orientation. Cautiously hopeful as he’d once been, Trueman could no longer see anything to salvage. Besides all this, the conference’s inaugural host church, Memorial Presbyterian, recently voted to leave the PCA amid swirling controversy around its LGBT community outreach and its openly gay lead pastor, Greg Johnson.
The speed of this decline naturally prompts a question: Was there ever anything to salvage? In its current incarnation, are we witnessing a radical moral turn? Or are we witnessing the inevitable end of an inherently flawed project?
Before the first Revoice conference, Wesley Hill and Ron Belgau co-founded the group blog Spiritual Friendship in 2012, where they developed their new philosophy together with an ecumenical group of contributors. Catholic writer Eve Tushnet also contributed thoughts at her Patheos blog. As a shorthand for groups with divergent views on the topic, they used the metaphor of a record’s “A” and “B” sides. “Side A Christians” believed God would bless their gay relationships, while “Side B Christians” pursued chastity, some through heterosexual marriage, but most through celibacy.
Yet, even in celibacy, they proposed that they could still accept and sublimate their sexuality as a kind of gift. Perhaps they could even recover a covenantal model of “spiritual friendship” that would offer a chaste relational substitute for marital permanence, even if both parties were same-sex attracted. Tushnet, who first coined the phrase “a vocation of yes,” has recently written about her own exclusive commitment to another woman, the sort of commitment she has argued can strengthen a gay person’s walk with God. They openly identify as “a lesbian couple.”
In developing this philosophy, various Side B writers have rejected the idea that homosexual temptation is uniquely disordered. In his 2017 book All But Invisible, Revoice founder Nate Collins argued that the word “disordered” should apply equally to any sexual attraction outside monogamous male-female marriage. That same year, future Revoice collaborator Gregory Coles published his memoir Single, Gay, Christian, in which he speculated that his homosexual proclivity was not even a result of the Fall. Meanwhile, Hill, Belgau, and Tushnet all consistently normalized certain manifestations of same-sex desire, blurring the lines between proto-romance and “spiritual friendship.”
This normalization has been succinctly crystallized by Revoice charter speaker Grant Hartley, who has asserted explicitly that not all same-sex romance is “off limits” in a Side B framework, only same-sex sex. He goes on to elaborate that some “Side B folks” might “pursue relationships with the same sex which might be called ‘romantic’—the category of ‘romance’ is vague.” Hartley first provoked controversy with his inaugural Revoice talk, endorsed by Hill, which proposed that Christians could mine gay culture for “queer treasure.” For example, he analogizes “coming out of the closet” to death and resurrection. Even in spaces like a gay club, he feels a sense of “homecoming.”
Read More
Related Posts:

We tend to think that someone or something else will help in time of need, but not Jesus. Maybe we think we’ve sinned too badly, or too many times, to go to Him again. Perhaps we think we can handle our weaknesses and sins on our own, or with a little help from a friend. But the author of Hebrews provides us with every reason to confidently draw near to Jesus, “Since then we have a great high priest…Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” (Heb. 4:14, 16). Believers can approach God confidently because of the person and work of Christ. And when we do, we can be confident that we will “receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).

Where do you turn when you have sinned? If we’re honest, it’s not always to the throne of grace. When we have grown irritated, frustrated, or angry; or when we let an entire day go by without thanking God for the many blessings He has given us; or when jealousy and envy pervade our hearts, we don’t usually feel confident about drawing near to God. Oftentimes we want to hide, make excuses, or blame another person, or circumstance. But if you, like me, have tried to go to anyone or anything except the throne of grace in the wake of sin, you know that it isn’t helpful. However, when we go to Jesus we find “a great high priest who has passed through the heavens” (Heb. 4:14).
Jesus is unlike any other priest about whom the Scriptures speak. He is not only superior to every other priest (Heb. 5:1-4), He is also from a different order of the priesthood (vv. 6, 10). Furthermore, after accomplishing the redemption of God’s people, He “passed through the heavens” (4:14) and “sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs” (1:3-4). Not only this, He is a fully human and fully divine high priest. Therefore, when we are in need of grace, we have no reason to turn away from the faith, or waver from the faith, or doubt the faith that we profess and hold so dear. Instead, we have every reason to “hold fast our confession” (4:14) and go to the throne of grace.
Sometimes, in the wake of sin, it is tempting to think that God is incapable of empathizing with us. What wonderful news, then, that “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15). If you read the gospel accounts, you will not only be encouraged, but will soon realize that when Jesus came to earth He experienced what it was like to be human, so that He can help us in time of need. Remember, we are too weak to carry out God’s will in our lives. We don’t have the power to persevere, but God does.
Read More
Related Posts:

Written by Ben C. Dunson |
Tuesday, September 10, 2024
Spiritual independence is the notion that the church must resist all attempts, no matter where they originate, to prevent it from faithfully carrying out its divinely ordained ministry. “When it is faithful in this duty” of preserving its independence, “the benefits of union [of church and state] can be appreciated and, if and when necessary,” the union of church and state “will be abandoned . . . in the interests of truth” (Age of Revolution, p. 22). That is to say, as long as the church’s independence is preserved, there are times when circumstances will dictate that a union of church and state is to be rejected, even if it is legitimate in principle.

Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (1801–1876) was a Dutch Reformed Protestant historian and politician who founded the political party Abraham Kuyper would eventually join and serve in as Prime Minister.
Against Political Atheism
Numerous themes show up repeatedly in Prinsterer’s writings. Two central ones were the danger of the revolutionary ideology unleashed by the French Revolution and the relationship between church and state. These two themes were integrally connected in Prinsterer’s mind: he saw the radical separation of church and state in France as a great peril to the survival of the church in that nation (or any that followed its example).
Prinsterer summed up his basic position on the relationship between church and state in his published lectures entitled Unbelief and Revolution (p. 32, n. 22) like this:
Church and State should not be separated but kept distinct, united in joint consultations from a position of mutual independence . . . . If the Christian church loses it priority, freedom of conscience is without defenses against the intolerance of unbelief. Unbelief becomes the civic religion of a secular state.
Later in this same work he refers to the default position of France as one of state-sanctioned “political atheism” (Unbelief and Revolution, p. 33). France, despite the claims of some at the time, was not a neutral ground on which all religions could compete, but itself had an official religion, albeit an atheistic one. All state institutions (including primary education) were forced to deny the truths of Christianity. In France, “no positive religion whatsoever,” he continued, “shall be tolerated in opposition to the requirements of revolutionary sociability”(Unbelief and Revolution, p. 103). This is not at all dissimilar to what we see in Western nations today regarding moral issues like abortion and sexuality. Religion may be tolerated as long as it remains a purely inward and private affair, but if at any point it threatens the (sexual) revolutionary sociability an attempt will be made to suppress it ruthlessly.
Prinsterer believed firmly that church and state were divine institutions with distinct spheres of authority. The church does not have the right to usurp the power of the state, nor the state the power of the church. Distinction does not entail radical separation, however.
On the Necessity of Political Prudence
Although maintaining such a distinction, Prinsterer’s articulation of the ideal relationship between church and state is not wholly compatible with the contemporary political theory of liberalism. In another work, entitled Christian Political Action in an Age of Revolution, he develops an additional insight of relevance to ongoing discussions in Christian “post-liberal” circles about the relations of church and state.
In this book Prinsterer says emphatically, in response to a critique: “I am an ardent opponent of the separation of church and state, though not as ardent as Mr. Trottet imagines.” What Prinsterer takes issue with in his opponent’s criticism is, as he says, that Trottet advocates “an absolute separation,” of church and state “as a universal truth . . . thus raising it to the rank of an article of faith” (Age of Revolution, p. 21). In his critic’s understanding any formal relationship between church and state is ruled illegitimate as a matter of absolute and inflexible moral principle.
This is similar to the position of many today, even among Protestants who come from a tradition that for centuries vigorously supported a specific kind of formal connection of church and state. It is one thing to say that it is unwise to seek such a relationship today; it is quite another thing to say that that position is categorically wrong. The Reformers and their heirs and not infallible, but one does need to grapple with their actual arguments on church and state instead of superficially dismissing them.
Here is where I think Prinsterer is most interesting and potentially helpful. He argues that there are times when the very “interests of religious freedom” (here understood as the freedom of true Christians to worship freely) necessitate restricting “the exercise of [some] political rights . . .  to members of the State Church” (Age of Revolution, pp. 21-22). As examples of such times he lists the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and the Catholic League (1576), both of which set out to murder Protestants and eliminate Protestantism in France, as well as the violent attacks on Protestants during the Thirty-Years War and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), which had granted Protestants toleration in France since 1598.
Read More
Related Posts: